2008 Comic Book News Archives

All Star Superman #1

October 28, 2008: Grant Morrison Talks "All Star Superman"

Newsarama.com has published the 5th part of their 10-part expose on "All Star Superman" with writer Grant Morrison. Here's an excerpt from this interview...

    Q: How have your perceptions of Superman and his supporting characters evolved since the Superman 2000 pitch you did with Mark Waid, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer? The Superman notions seem almost identical, but Luthor is very different here than in that pitch, and so is Clark Kent. Did you use some aspects of your original pitch, or have you just changed his mind on how to portray these characters since?

    Grant Morrison: A little of both. I wanted to approach All Star Superman as something new, but there were a couple of specific aspects from the Superman 2000 pitch (as I mentioned earlier, it was actually called Superman Now, at least in my notebooks, which is where the bulk of the material came from) that I felt were definitely worth keeping and exploring.

    I can't remember much about Luthor from Superman Now, except for the ending. By the time I got to All Star Superman, I'd developed a few new insights into Luthor's character that seemed to flesh him out more.

    Luthor's really human and charismatic and hateful all the same time. He's the brilliant, deluded egotist in all of us. The key for me was the idea that he draws his eyebrows on. The weird vanity of that told me everything I needed to know about Luthor.

    I thought the real key to him was the fact that, brilliant as he is, Luthor is nowhere near as brilliant as he wants to be or thinks he is. For Luthor, no praise, no success, no achievement is ever enough, because there's a big hungry hole in soul. His need for acknowledgement and validation is superhuman in scale. Superman needs no thanks, he does what he does because he's made that way. Luthor constantly rails against his own sense of failure and inadequacy...and Superman's to blame, of course.

    I've recently been re-thinking Luthor again for a different project, and there's always a new aspect of the character to unearth and develop.

Read all 5 parts of the 10-part interview at Newsarama.com.



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